S. African officers' tactics stir outrage

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa The footage is shaky but unmistakable. A slender man in a red T-shirt, black pants and sneakers is tied to the back of a police truck. He kicks. He writhes. The vehicle pulls away, dragging him behind it. Police officers run along with him. Cellphone cameras snap away.

“What did he do?” bystanders shouted.

“It was him who started it,” a police officer replied.

Late Tuesday, the man, since identified as Mido Macia, 27, a taxi driver from Mozambique, died of head injuries at the Daveyton Police Station, 27 miles southeast of here.

In South Africa, where crime, vigilante attacks and police brutality are daily fare, the mobile phone video has incited outrage.

“The police don't even care that people are watching,” said Moses Dlamini of the Independent Investigative Directorate, which investigates police crimes, in a television interview. For many, the video was a reminder of the harsh treatment meted out to black citizens under apartheid, when South Africa's police force was notorious for its harsh tactics.

Then, the officers were likely to be white and at the command of a racial dictatorship. Now they are almost entirely black, serving a democratically elected government.

Under apartheid, more than 70 percent of police stations were in white areas despite the fact that whites were less than 20 percent of the population. Their job was clearly to protect whites from blacks, said Gareth Newham, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies and an expert on South African policing.

After 1994, when apartheid ended, millions were spent on cashing out apartheid-era officials and recruiting new members to the force. Its emphasis was supposed to shift to serving black South Africans.

The government enacted tough new policies. Huge recruitment drives added 70,000 new officers and administrators to the force.

“You have thousands of people coming in, so the standard for recruitment dropped,” Newham said. “Training dropped from two years to one. You can't do proper vetting.”

The past year has been tough for the troubled police. In August 2012, officers opened fire on striking miners in the town of Marikana, killing 34 of them.

And videos showing police brutality have surfaced.

A 2011 episode in Vaalwater, in Limpopo province, was captured on a video, showing an officer kicking a man who appeared to be bloody and unconscious. In that case, the crowd seems to be egging him on.

Not in Daveyton, where protesters gathered at the police station on Thursday, demanding that the officers be prosecuted.

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